In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent for Perth Boutique Firms: Catch AI Disclosure, Citation and Privilege Issues Before Lodgement

It’s Thursday afternoon in your St Georges Terrace office. The principal is in mediation, the senior associate is briefing counsel, and you — a four-person practice — are finalising an expert witness statement for an Administrative Review Tribunal matter due tomorrow morning. The expert used an AI tool to summarise their methodology section. The brief mentions a 2019 authority you haven’t pulled. There’s a paragraph that quietly references settlement correspondence you’re not sure was meant to leave the matter file. In a larger firm, three people would catch these. In yours, it’s you. The In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent is built for that gap.

The problem

Boutique firms under ten lawyers carry the same procedural and ethical obligations as national practices but without the layered review process. The Administrative Review Tribunal’s expert evidence guidance requires expert witnesses to disclose the basis of their opinions and the materials they relied on — and where generative AI has been used in preparing an expert report, that use is the kind of thing a tribunal expects to be surfaced, not hidden. At the same time, the Federal Court’s General Practice Note on AI (GPN-AI) and the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules (Rule 19, candour to the court; Rule 17, honesty in communications) make the practitioner responsible for what lands in a filed document — including citations a model invented and privileged material a model surfaced from an attached training file. For a small firm the failure mode isn’t lack of care; it’s lack of a second pair of eyes between draft and lodgement.

What the In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent does

The In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent runs alongside your drafting workflow and flags three classes of risk while the document is still in draft — not after lodgement, not in a post-mortem:

• Missing AI disclosure — where the draft contains characteristics of generative AI use (expert reports, witness statements, submissions) and lacks the disclosure language the relevant forum expects
• Dubious citations — case references, paragraph pinpoints, court/year combinations that don’t resolve against the Australian authority registry (Federal Court, High Court, State Supreme Courts, AustLII)
• Privilege risks — fragments that look like settlement correspondence, without-prejudice material, or content from another matter file that has been carried across by copy-paste or AI summarisation

Each finding is a nudge with a recommended action, not a block. The lawyer stays in control.

How it works

1. You paste or upload your in-progress draft (.txt or .md) into the RuleCheck interface
2. The agent extracts every citation pattern, scans for AI-use signals, and runs a privilege-risk pass over the text
3. Citations are checked deterministically against the Australian authority registry — no model inference, no draft content sent to an external LLM
4. The agent returns a structured nudge list: each item carries a severity, the line reference, and the recommended action
5. You act on the nudges, re-run, and lodge with a clean readiness report attached to the matter file

Why this matters in Perth

Perth boutique firms run lean and frequently appear in federal forums (Federal Court WA Registry, ART), the Supreme Court of Western Australia, and federally-regulated commissions. The ART’s expert evidence and practice direction framework applies regardless of where the practitioner is located, and the same applies to GPN-AI and the ASCR — adopted in WA via the Legal Profession Uniform Law framework. The practical issue for a Perth boutique isn’t a different rulebook; it’s that a four-to-eight-lawyer practice carries the full obligation set without the review redundancy a larger firm has. An in-draft nudge layer is the structural fix for that: it doesn’t replace lawyer judgement, it gives a small team the equivalent of a checklist a bigger firm gets from headcount. The agent is delivered through RuleCheck by Exegesis (live beta at rulecheck.onrender.com), the local-first, deterministic, no-external-LLM pre-lodgement checker — the same architecture as the Citation Verification Agent, extended to AI-disclosure and privilege passes.

Sources

• Administrative Review Tribunal — Practice Directions and Other Guidance: https://www.art.gov.au/help-and-resources/professionals-and-practitioners/practice-directions-and-other-guidance
• Federal Court of Australia — Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Practice Note (GPN-AI): https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/law-and-practice/practice-documents/practice-notes/gpn-ai
• Law Council of Australia — Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules: https://lawcouncil.au/policy-agenda/regulation-of-the-profession-and-ethics/australian-solicitors-conduct-rules
• AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute): https://www.austlii.edu.au/

Exegesis capability references:

• RuleCheck by Exegesis — live beta
• In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent spec

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — be the first to know when access opens for Perth boutique firms

The In-Draft Compliance Nudge Agent is being scoped for boutique-firm pricing (per-user monthly or small-firm licence). Tell us what you’d actually use and we’ll shape the tier around it.

Schema